“If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.” That phrase, plastered across an iconic movie poster, hung in my room for a good portion of my life, and no film in the saga better captures this mantra better than “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” The second film in the currently four film series is full of adventure and is often considered the darkest of its counterparts. So what makes the Temple of Doom such an unique film not just in a series that has awed generations but within the film medium?

The first film in the series, “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was an unequivocal success that still, to this day, is the highest grossing film of the series (Box Office Mojo, N/A). The film paired a number of cinema icons in Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas, each coming off their own monumental successes, with rogue superstar Harrison Ford. Expectations for the sequel were high, to say the least, from both the audience and the team tasked with delivering a blockbuster. And to a quite an extent, the film delivered. The budget was big, the storyline was appealing (as predictable as it may be), and the profit was as high as anyone could have hoped for. It fit the mold of what was popular at the time, as it seemed like an iconic action movie was being released every year. From Star Wars to Jaws, and the Terminator to Aliens, everyone wanted films that were exciting and didn’t make them overthink. Critics, for the It was, for all intents and purposes, a massive success, so what led Stephen Spielberg to say that he “wasn’t happy with the second film at all,” and that he thought he “out-poltered Poltergeist (Hughes, 2017).”

 “Dark” is often one of the first things that comes to mind when many “Indy” fans think of the second installment, and it does not take a hard-core fan to notice that this film is distinctly darker than the others. What’s ironic is that the film was not made with that strong of an intention. Rather it was the tumultuous personal lives of the director and story writer that led to a much different film that surprised even them. “Part of it was I was going through a divorce, Steven had just broken up and we were not in a good mood, so we decided on something a little more edgy,” storywriter George Lucas recalled. “It ended up darker than we thought it would be. Once we got out of our bad moods, which went on for a year or two, we kind of looked at it and went, ‘Mmmmm, we certainly took it to the extreme (Hutchinson, 2014).” Lucas and Spielberg both wanted the darker film, and Lucas often drew the parallel between another popular franchise: Star Wars. Just as the 2^nd Star Wars film was distinctly darker than the first, so too did the creative team want the Indiana Jones films to go, just not to the extreme it was taken to.

“Temple of Doom” and Indiana Jones as a whole made huge waves in two very different fields: the familiar film business and in the not quite so popular Archaeological field. Most people would recognize the ever-popular PG-13 rating, and many teenagers pine for the day that reach the age to watch a PG-13 film. But before “Temple of Doom”, there was steep jump from PG movies to R-Rated Films. Spielberg was frustrated that so many people were upset that they had taken their kids to see “Temple of Doom,” a dark and violent film with a scene showing a graphic human sacrificing. Spielberg had run into the same issue with Jaws, so he directly contacted the President of the Motion Pictures Association to suggest a new rating, which he called “PG-13.” “So many films were falling into a netherworld, you know, of unfairness,” Spielberg recalls explaining, and the President readily agreed. The PG-13 rating was born, and it has gone on to become the most popular and profitable of all of the ratings (Pallota, 2014). While Archaeology does not have quite the widespread appeal as PG-13 movies do, the film brought the often-forgotten field to the forefront of the time. “These films introduced so many people to archaeology,” said the Curator of the Indiana Jones Archaeological Exhibit and famed archaeologist Fred Hiebert. “We can document their impact statistically, based on the number of archaeology students before and after the first film. Some of the best archaeologists in the world today say Indiana Jones was what sparked their initial interest (Berlin, 2015).” Treasured Indiana Jones sidekick John Rhys-Davies recalls that he has “met at least 150 or 160 full professors, lecturers, practicing archaeologists who have come up to me to say their first interest in archaeology began” after watching the series. Truly, there are few films that have been able to have such a wide impact on such a unique and often underappreciated fields as Indiana Jones has had on the field of Archaeology.